The pictures are from Johannesburg’s Oliver Tambo airport.
The airport stores are well-stocked with African handicraft and souvenir items, and seemed to be doing a brisk business even though it’s winter time and not the tourist season.
Our Airbus A340-300 was filled to capacity. The number 4 engine did not start properly, though, and we went back to the gate for a check-up.
Take your time, technicians, I thought .. make sure everything is A-OK. All was resolved after 30 minutes, and we were on our way.
I am at Cape Town airport. It’s a 2-hour hop to Johannesburg and then onto a direct flight of 13 hrs to Hong Kong from there. I resisted buying any more Afrikaans books (already bought 4), t-shirts or bottles of South African olive oil that are shaped like Table Mountain !
Here is an unusual license plate I spotted at a traffic stop, so let me decode it for you. I think it says ‘O-o-oh! Western Province’. The Oh as in O Canada, the national anthem, and Western Province is probably a reference to the local provincial rugby team with their venerable striped jerseys. The Western Province rugby team is the arch enemy of the Blue Bulls, the team from up north in the Pretoria area.
I like to look for t-shirts that shows the city or country that I find myself in. This one is by Quiksilver with their wave-and-mountain logo (depicting a tsumani?). And it does explain that the big SA stands for ‘South Africa’. The small print is of South African beaches and surf terms. The most famous South African surf beach – Jeffreys Bay – is missing, though.
I am staying in the town of Stellenbosch in the Cape Town area with my family for the week. Here are some of my favorite offerings from the big local grocery store – that sells much more than just groceries.
We arrived at 4.45 am local time with the sun just coming up from the east. So one of two 8 hr flights done, and the next one is due south to Johannesburg.
Here is how I will get to Cape Town from Hong Kong. It’s on Qatar Airways with two 8 hour flights and then the ‘hop’ down to Cape Town on South African Airways from Johannesburg. The stop in Doha shows where Qatar is : a kingdom on the small Qatar Peninsula on the much larger Arabian Peninsula. Qatar is arguably the world’s richest country : it’s estimated 2011 GDP per capita was $102,943 according to the International Monetary Fund.
These pictures are from near the Tsim Tsa Tsui station in Kowloon, along Nathan Road. It is warm and muggy outside! Walking around makes you break out in a soaking sweat for that ‘swimming in it’ feeling.
My flight to South Africa is on Sunday. It rained all Saturday which was fine with me : I could use it as an excuse to relax in the hotel and catch up on what’s happening in the world with the TV coverage of the elections in Greece and in Egypt this weekend. I did catch the Marriott SkyCity’s shuttle bus to the Tung Chung station and shopping mall close by.
It is time for a get-away from the slog at work. A colleague and I got the van to Hong Kong on Friday for our flights from the airport this weekend. A little travel disaster struck me when I got out of the van at the hotel : inadvertently left my cell phone on the seat, with the driver disappearing from sight as I ran back out of the hotel. We did have his phone number but as I was trying to figure out the dialing codes for mainland China to call him from my room, the front desk called. Was I the person that left my phone in the van? Yes, yes! I said. May we ‘inconvenience you, sir’ into coming down to the lobby to get it? (You can inconvenience me all you want!). And there he was, the driver with my phone. Don’t worry so much! he said, as he handed me the phone.
par·a·sol [par-uh-sawl, -sol] noun
a lightweight umbrella used, especially by women, as a sunshade.
Parasols are not used much in the USA (why is that?), but they seem to be quite popular in China – especially when the sun is scorching down. This is not far from where I work. It is lunch time and a good thing that the cafeteria is close by !
I had to find out what the deal with this bird is : several nights now I have seen reports about it on the Japanese TV channel NHK. One evening there was a news clip showing a nest with a new chick in it. The researchers watching through a camera with a telephoto lens were beside themselves. Well, it is a toki or a Japanese crested ibis. The birds hover on the brink of extinction. They used to be found in pine forests and wetlands all over Japan, China and also in South Korea. A small population does remain in Shaanxi Province in China – but in Japan there are only 5 breeding pairs, on Sado Island in Niigata Prefecture. They are all fitted with GPS devices, designated as National Natural Treasures. I see some websites show its scientific name as Rhacophorus schlegelii – but Wikipedia says it is Nipponia nippon. It does not get any more Japanese than that !
Here is my acquisition of the day from the fruit market : a papaya (in Chinese木瓜 mù guā), which means ‘tree melon’. Yes, papayas grow on trees with a single stem that can get 10m (30ft) tall. Papayas have good stuff inside, with lots of vitamin A and vitamin C.
I checked into the news reports about Apple’s annual world-wide developers conference in San Francisco (WWDC 2012) and found this beautiful conference logo. (There is a new operating system for the iPhone and iPad on the way, new Macbook computers but no iPhone 5 announcement. That’s fine with me. I’m not itching to get a new phone!).
There was lots of water at the 2012 French Open Mens Final between Nadal and Djokovic : not Perrier mineral water, but rain. So when the match was suspended (again) for the day, Nadal was up two sets to one, and Djokovic up 2-1 in the 4th set. Play is to resume at 1pm local time on Monday.
Poland and the Ukraine are co-hosting the Euro Cup 2012 soccer event that started Friday night. CCTV1 transmitted the Netherlands-Denmark match live last night. I watched until the Danes got the first goal in the 24th minute and then went to sleep .. turned out that was the only goal. ‘Slordig Oranje hard onderuit’ (Sloppy Orange team fell down hard’) says Dutch paper Volkskrant on-line. But they point out that the Orange team lost their first-round match in 1988 against Russia and then went on the win the Cup. So all is not lost for the Dutch?
Friday night found us in the Damiesha Sheraton’s lobby again for a beer and a burger (and other food). One of us ordered the burger without mayonnaise. ‘Mei you mayo’ I chimed in, and we all laughed at the instant double entendre (of sorts). Méi yǒu (没有) means have not / has not / does not exist / to not have / to not be. Here is another example. Some time ago I called the front desk after I had settled in my room. There was no internet connection cable in the wall (there usually is). Up to my room comes a guy, takes a look under the desk, looks up at me – somewhat surprised – and says ‘méi yǒu’. Yes, yes, ‘méi yǒu cable’ I said, grinning. (The cable was actually tucked away in another place in the desk). And what is mayonnaise in Chinese? Dàn huáng jiàng, literally ‘yellow egg jam’.
The National Higher Education Entrance Examination here in China, or commonly known as Gaokao, is an academic examination held annually for two to three days across the country. There is a lot of pressure : almost 9.15 million students will take the exam to vie for 6.85 million vacancies in the country’s universities and colleges. There are about 310,000 exam rooms at 7,300 venues nationwide. All of this sounds very similar to my situation in high school in South Africa with the Matriculation Exam I did ! (Once upon a time, a long time ago).
In the USA taking the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) is an important part of the admissions process – but just one of many criteria used by colleges and universities to make admissions decisions. The SAT test consists of three parts- Critical Reading, Mathematics and Writing. The scores from each section can range from 200 to 800, so the best possible total score is 2400. The average score is about 1500, though.